Farewell to Summer

Well summer, it's been great spending time with you, and now it's time to get ready for the new school year. I'm going to start off by saying how shocked I am that I am no longer a first-year student and am starting my second year of college. It scares me, and I wonder if I am spending my time here on Earth purposefully. It really is making me reevaluate my life and how I approach my friends and school.

I am so glad I stayed here on campus for the summer. I really strengthened good friendships, made new friends, and just this past week, got to meet all the incoming first-year international students that come a week early for orientation. It has been so cool getting to know them, and I know for sure next year that I will be a mentor for the new students in 2016. I thought I wasn't extroverted enough to do it this year, but I think that I didn't give myself enough credit. I'm just hanging out with all of them anyway, so I might as well be a mentor, and not to toot my own horn or anything, but I am somewhat of a good leader because leadership skills come with being the first born of a household of 7.

I'm actually a terrible leader, probably

I really feel like God has given me a passion for international students, and I really enjoy being around them, for some reason I can relate more to them than I can to the other American students on campus. They are more friendly, kind, caring for one another, and more seriously about the important stuff, a characteristic I really admire because I like to take school seriously and be diligent.

The fact that I am friends with the international students is sort of funny to me when I compare who I am now to who I was when I first started college. I remember filling out the online housing form before coming to college and selecting that I did not want to room with an international student, thinking that I would not be able to communicate clearly with them and that I wouldn't be helpful to someone from a different country. Little did I know that all of my really close friends would be international and that I was going to feel called to be friends with these awesome people.

God moves in mysterious ways. I know that God wanted me to be at college over the summer, and I have grown in so many ways and have learned to see a lot of things differently for the better. I cannot wait to see what He has in store for me next year and I am so excited to see how His plan unfolds.